A thread on why I hate ultras and other assorted so-called leftists who deride China's poverty alleviation efforts. This might run a bit long so get yourself a cup of tea or something. It will mostly touch on personal things and my engagements on trying to help others.

I was three years old when in 1989 when the Socialist Republic of Romania was dissolved. The sweeping de-regularizations and privatizations that were unleashed, although bougie intelligentsia would tell you otherwise, created a lot of hardships for people all over.

Due to this, my parents had to work almost day and night as a consequence of which I spent most of my youth in the countryside living, playing and working with my grandparents and cousins. We weren't abjectly poor, but weren't princelings either. I remember a simple life.

But even back then, even if a lot of it didn't affect me personally, I saw a lot of abject poverty in the countryside. Lack of healthcare - that existed pre-1989 - struggling people, lack of centralized education - that existed pre-1989 etc.

I remember my grandma (b. 1937 and still going strong) telling me how the first time she ever got shoes and education was from the socialist government when they started their rural infrastructure programs. Never before, in those "glorious olden days before evil communism".

Due to these experiences and a healthy upbringing from my grandparents and parents, I early on developed a community centered view which was tarnished in the capitalist educational system turning me into a reactionary individualist for much of my teenage years in the city.

I've been a reactionary, a liberal, an anarchist, MLM and finally an ML. I already was an ML when I started training Brazilian JiuJitsu and MMA with an amazing team in my city. Now, none of them are actually socialist, but our head coach is a very social minded person.

He each year organizes a food and clothing drive which is then distributed working with orgs to the neediest people around in the wider region. When I found out, I immediately joined in, because I knew that to be the right thing to do as someone calling himself socialist.

Most people don't realize how close abject poverty actually even is to them. The conditions I saw and the people besting them and surviving broke and warmed my heart at the same time. Below I'll show some photos from our 2017 distribution work. Some hard to swallow pills.

Here are some of the food waiting to be distributed. We always collect food stuff that aren't prone to spoiling or going bad quickly. Donations of food and clothing are year round, but most comes in around December through a program of ours.

Every December our team organized a grappling tournament with teams from all around the country. Those who participate in the grappling don't have to pay an entry fee if they bring around 6 kgs of food stuffs or clothing. Attendants pay a symbolic price which is pooled.

The money pooled this way was through orgs used to buy building materials, concrete, iron, bricks and so on. One of our greatest achievements was building a simple two room house for one of the families who lived in a shack with holes as big as my palm in the walls.

This is one of the families we helped. The father wasn't home because he is a day laborer nearby. That one room is their entire living space, a small not even house with thin walls, not even plastered and painted as you can see in the ceiling.

A different family. That run down building behind the little girl isn't for their farm animals, it's their living space. We gave them food and clothing and as we were leaving she came out and stood there looking at us. Until the day I die, I'll never forget her face.

Yet at a different family, in the freezing December, they didn't have rugs to put on the stone, neither socks. One of the things we gave them were socks and they burst into tears. Can you imagine being that happy for socks? Imagine that abject poverty.

The shack the family mentioned above used to live in and the house our team helped fund and build. It's nothing fancy, not a mansion, but it's heated, insulated, tap water and bathroom. I know it seems like little, but in that shack they had zero of that.

At one place we had to fix the lights because for days they were sitting in darkness in the house because nobody gives a damn about these people. Especially not our neoliberal capitalist hell hole of a state, that's why initiatives like ours have to do it.

Some of these photos are obviously cropped to protect the identity of the people involved, but these are the conditions we see and operate in.

Now for one or more pasty ass western so called leftist to come out from under the rocks like a 蠹 and say that poverty alleviation is meaningless and unimportant, then ramble on about some obtuse theoretical point is just insulting and immoral.

Oh, but there still is value form, there still are classes, muh cooperatives. Motherfucker, you think these people care two bits about your whinefest? You think they see the same vaunted value in poverty that you do even though you've never been poor one day in your life?

I find it disgusting that sheltered people who never struggled in their entire damn lives fetishize poverty as some moral badge of honor, meanwhile they live a comfortable life and have a cushy job uptown.

Like, we all know socialism is not poverty alleviation in and of itself, but this should be seen as one if not the biggest part of it. Instead of whining on about moot theoretical points, the immediate needs of the people should be considered paramount.

It's less important if Vaush or any other sheltered dork thinks you're socialist or not. This is in any case a process and a long one, which you'd know if you had read Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng and even Jiang and Xi.

People not only don't know directly about the abject poverty surrounding their comfortable little bubble, they have zero idea about poverty in China, yet have the shameless audacity to talk shit about the 脱贫 program.

My country is a capitalist hellhole and it abandoned these people. China calls itself being in the primary stage of socialism and lifted 800+ million people out of absolute poverty and you call them capitalists. Based on my experience, you're the ones coping, not them lying.

On these distribution routes of ours I talked to the people whom we help and told them about certain things without telling them it's socialism, because there's still such anti-socialist propaganda here, it would instantly cut the discussion short. But they are curious.

This could thus also be seen as a tool of radicalization and organizing, but based on Vaush's comments wrt comrade Hakim, pos western so called leftists would spit on these poor people like the fascists do here. It's quite telling actually.

There's one more thing here. The BJJ/MMA team I work with aren't socialists, they're simply good people who want to help those more unfortunate than them. This flies in the face of the puritanical "I only work with other leftists" bullshit idealism so prevalent here.

Lenin mentioned in "Left-wing communism: an infantile disorder" how in organizing you will at times be forced to work with outright reactionary people too and how even that must be done. These people who organize these programs aren't reactionaries, but aren't socialists either.

So, the next you tell someone "oh, I'd love to do something, but there are no socialist parties around", go out and find some people to do good with. They don't need to be card carrying communist party members. They simply need to be humans.

I know I started out with the perhaps badly phrased "...and my engagements with trying to help others", but I hope you can see that I was trying not to make this about myself. The credit is due to my coach and the BJJ/MMA team who accepted me to help them.